Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) is becoming one of the main strategies that Information Technology (IT) organizations use to organize their business functions into interoperable, standards-based services, which can in turn be combined and reused quickly to meet the IT organization's business needs. However, as the number of services increase, the overall complexity of the system also increases and, without proper governance and infrastructure, SOA technology can quickly result in a “service explosion” that does not scale well.
As larger enterprises and organizations start to deploy SOA-based solutions, there is a trend to do so in a compartmentalized manner, typically on a project-by-project basis, rather than as one single enterprise-wide scheme. This trend in compartmentalization is driven by a number of factors, including the funding model for various projects, and the need to delegate or contain scope of control for certain projects. In some instances, each of these compartments contains an instance of an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) at its core, providing an abstraction of location, evolution, and basic transformation capabilities for the services within that compartment. As a result, the concept or future of an enterprise-wide Service Bus, in which all of the services are integrated together, does not reflect the reality of today's SOA deployments. The resulting environment is instead a new era of data silos, wherein the sharing of services is limited to the services that are contained within a compartment. This in turn limits the ability of an enterprise to transform its business and achieve greater agility. This is the area the present invention is designed to address.